Ireland Travel Guide

Last spring I traveled to County Cork, Ireland to visit my dear friend Shannen Keane. We met through my First We Eat photography workshops, (she attended the Sweden one and the Iceland one), and we hit it off immediately. She’s a hilarious, fun-loving woman who happens to be an *insanely* talented baker, and she owns and runs her own bakery, Diva Boutique Bakery + Cafe, in Kinsale, Ireland.

She took me all over southern Ireland—from Ballymaloe Cookery School where I met up with other First We Eat graduates (I’m looking at you, Jennifer + Hans) to the Timoleague Friary ruins to the beautiful Bantry House manor + gardens. Every place we went, I fell deeper and deeper in love with this lush, green countryside paradise, its warm and welcoming people, and their passion for local, sustainable farm-to-table food. Sometimes when we’d step out of Shannen’s car, I’d have to blink a few times to make sure what we were looking at was real and not some sort of green fairytale dreamscape. (Fun side note about Shannen’s car—we managed to get it stuck by balancing the car perfectly on a hump in a field so that not all of the tires could touch the ground at the same time. We’d pulled off the road to walk down to the seashore…and realized we couldn’t move the car any further. So we just hung out on the beach until her partner came to help get the car off the hump predicament. It was kind of the ideal stuck-on-a-hump scenario, and resulted in even more beach time. Yay!)Walking around this place felt like stepping into a storybook, and I knew I had to host a workshop here. So, after over a year of planning, I’ve opened registration for my photography + storytelling workshop in Glengarriff, Ireland, and co-hosting alongside me will be Izy Hossack of Top With Cinnamon. We’ll stay in Linden House, a cottage made from local stone perched atop a hillside overlooking Glengarriff Harbor with sweeping views of the sea. Along with the photography and storytelling portion of the workshop, we’ll also cover manipulating natural light, creating an animated GIF, editing in Adobe Lightroom, and discuss the business side of photography, blogging, branding, and social media. During the course of the workshop, we’ll also visit the 18th century manor Bantry House and its beautiful, sprawling gardens. We’ll also be enjoying delicious Irish country fare prepared by dear Shannen. You can read more and register here and via the link below, I’d love to see & host you in Ireland!